Credit to Jack for silencing mindless jeering

THE booing of Ryan Jack on his Scotland debut was an embarrassing business. There can be no sugarcoating what happened at Pittodrie on Thursday night. The new boy wasn’t booed because some people felt he shouldn’t have been in the squad. He wasn’t booed because he was having a bad game. He was booed simply because he used to be the captain of Aberdeen. And he left to join Rangers. Jack returns to his home city as an Ibrox employee on December 3. If every Dons fan in Pittodrie wants to give him pelters for 90 minutes solid that day, then fire away. You’d expect nothing less. But internationals are football’s answer to the Christmas Day truce on the western front. For 90 minutes, the petty, small-minded bitterness of the Scottish football fan is supposed to be left at the door. Put to one side in support of a greater cause. The booing of a vocal minority of mindless pygmies, then, broke every convention of international football. It embarrassed the player. Worse, it embarrassed his family. A student education in Aberdeen didn’t teach the likes of me much. But it did provide an eye-opening experience in how the locals think. Watching England host Scotland at Wembley in 1988 from the sanctuary of the Pittodrie Bar, the introduction of the late Tommy Burns as a 74th-minute substitute for local hero Neil Simpson went down like a salad in Jeremy Clarkson’s lunchbox. Give credit to Ryan Jack, then. His Scotland credentials queried by a few of us before a 1-0 defeat to Holland, the boy did himself no harm as a makeshift right-back. No thanks, it should be said, to the city where he grew up.